


Death and All His Friends

by Sylvestris



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Blue Christmeth 2013, Gen, Ghosts, Granite State
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:07:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walt doesn't believe in ghosts, much less in engaging them in conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death and All His Friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [warriorpoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/gifts).



> For warriorpoet; this was a fantastic prompt to work with, and I hope you enjoy.
> 
> This story now has a [soundtrack](http://8tracks.com/sylvestris/death-and-all-his-friends).

{ _one_ }

Ed has been gone three weeks and a day when Gale arrives. Walt isn't as startled as he could have been. He understands the psychological effects of extended isolation, and lately he has spent more time pacing than sleeping.

Less expected is how Gale moves around the cabin as if it's his own, singing quietly and preparing a kettle for tea, as Walt stands unnoticed on the threshold; it gives Walt the uneasy sense that he himself is the one out of place, the intrusive apparition. It disturbs him so thoroughly that he slams the door and retreats, down the porch steps and back out into the open, to catch his breath among the featureless trees. When he returns to the cabin, he finds himself alone. The kettle is reassuringly cold to the touch.

Gale reappears a few days later, when Walt is kneeling in the forest, breathless from gathering firewood. Again, he is not surprised; he has been awake for most of the past few days. He concentrates on the weight of the axe in his hands and the thumping of his heart, and pretends not to have seen anything extraordinary.

"Did you come out here to live deliberately, as it were?" asks Gale. Walt doesn't believe in ghosts, much less in engaging them in conversation, but Gale lingers there in the thin afternoon sunlight, politely waiting for him to answer.

"What do you mean?"

Gale huffs a modest little laugh. "'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately'," he recites, "'to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.' _Walden_. Thoreau."

"Thoreau," Walt repeats, feeling briefly sickened. In death, Gale is irrepressibly himself, and as harmless as ever. "Of course."

He sweats over the cutting of the firewood as Gale talks peacefully about foraging for local herbs and seasonal mushrooms, enumerates the nutritional values of pine bark, and wonders aloud whether an infusion of slippery elm might help ease Walt's cough.

"You are not here," Walt says, finally. "I am alone. I am _alone_." He says it forcefully enough that an echo ripples through the trees, and swings the axe again, hard, so that the blade sinks deep into the wood. Gale is silent.

 

 

 

In time, Walt has settled in well enough to notice all the small things about the cabin that aren't quite right: draughts slip in between the floorboards, the door rattles in its frame, spots of peeling paint suggest damp. He sets about fixing everything, and is immediately frustrated by his lack of adequate tools, but does what he can with what he has on hand; the longer everything takes, the better he can keep himself occupied.

The television does, eventually, pick up a Québécois news bulletin riddled with static, and it is the first time in weeks that Walt has heard a voice beside his own. He listens so closely that it's not clear when the rattling of the door behind him resolves itself into the sound of a person knocking - definitely a person knocking, as much as he tells himself it's just the wind.

"What, you need me to open the door?" he shouts, at last, out of sheer frustration, because this is ridiculous.

"No," says Jesse, sitting cross-legged on the bed. "I'm good."

Walt is struck by how very young he looks, and simultaneously by a wrenching feeling of grief. Jesse's no more than a boy, sweatshirt sleeves pushed back to expose his narrow wrists. His lanky frame evokes Junior at thirteen or fourteen. Skate shoes. Walt's second son.

He can only stare as Jesse's white hands toy with a packet of cigarettes and a lighter that clicks on with a heatless flame. He cups his hands around his mouth and exhales smoke as harmless as shadows.

 

 

 *

 

When Walt writes Ed a list of everything he needs to start a new course of chemotherapy, he does it fearing that this is what it feels like when metastatic cancer finally spreads to the brain. He searches for meaning in the memory of what Dr. Delcavoli told him the last time they met, although he remembers it as if it had been a meeting between two strangers; all he knows for sure is that his odds are narrowing down.

The drugs proliferate again: analgesics, anti-tussives, anti-emetics, anxiolytics. Walt sleeps fitfully and dreams vividly. One night Gus appears in the room, settles himself in the chair by his bed, folds his hands in his lap and smiles. In his tweed suit and gold-rimmed glasses he looks more like a kindly scholar than anything else, though Walt still feels an irrational thrill of fear.

"So," Gus begins. "What have you learnt?"

Silence spins out between them.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Walt hears himself say. The words come so reflexively that he can convince himself he's just dreaming. Gus nods in perfect understanding.

"What is called resignation is confirmed desperation," Gus replies.

 

  
{ _two_ }

On the day when Walt has to stop to catch his breath three times on the way to the gate and four times on the way back, he accepts that these are his last months. The pain is quiet and constant, a gentle complaint originating somewhere deep in his bones. He must breathe carefully and deliberately.

He can't stop thinking about what will happen to his body after he dies. About what Ed will do. It seems foolish to hope for a grave of some kind, and naive to think that Ed might simply entrust his body to the forest where traces might be found in a few years or decades, although Walt can think of worse fates. He does think of worse fates.

Perhaps this is why Mike comes to him next, close to midwinter, when the days have become short and cramped and the nights vast and hollow. Mike is no ethereal spirit. He brings silence as heavy as the snow, and in death he seems solid, relentless, frozen into his form. Not for the first time, Walt finds himself brimming with questions he can't quite voice.

He remembers the immediate and inescapable consequences of Mike's death: the fifteen minutes it had taken to drag Mike out of the rushes and haul him into the car, a man taller and heavier than he was, the blood sinking into their clothes and spilling into the sand. It had happened in such a quiet, safe place that there had been room for Walt to feel a crushing horror at what he'd done. He tries to construct a chain of consequences that leads the blame back to Mike himself, Mike calling him that night in the kitchen to say he was in after all, but -

"Mm. Let me tell you something, Walter: I had a few different options there, and that one seemed like the least worst, so to speak."

"Is that so?" says Walt. He doesn't mean to antagonise, but Mike's response has thrown him off, made him feel prickly and uncomfortable. "Because I remember you telling us that you regretted not taking care of Lydia when you had the chance."

"Taking care of Lydia..." Mike echoes, shaking his head. It's patronising, almost, as if he's talking to a wayward child. "We still mincing words, are we? No, I regretted not shooting her in the head when I had the chance. I _took care of her_ more times than I care to remember, back when we were with Fring, which leads me to something else." Mike leans forward and fixes Walt with that imperturbable stare. "Three months?"

"What?"

"Three months. Three months of having everything the way you wanted it, making more money than you could count, and then you decided you'd had enough. Not how you imagined it would be?"

Walt thinks of the whine of his last PET-CT and the insulated silence of the storage unit and feels his hackles rise, but Mike continues before he can retort.

"Fring had a number of reasons for doing what he did. Now, most of them were none of my business, which means they were most certainly none of _your_ business, but I'll tell you this much: one of them was commitment. He believed in making a commitment to something he felt was greater than himself, and by and large he cared a good deal about the people he worked with. Bringing out the best in them. Fostering ability, and so forth."

"If you're talking about Jesse," Walt says, "if you're trying to suggest that he would have been better off... Gus's men kidnapped him, forced him to cook. He was handcuffed in the lab. Is that acceptable to you? Should I have simply turned my back on that arrangement and left town? What happened to Jesse... what happened to him, in the end, was something that had to happen. I cared about him, Mike. Of course I cared about him. But when he became dangerous - _destructive_ \- the situation became untenable. You of all people should understand that."

Walt tries to draw breath, and is nearly bent double by a fit of coughing; when he surfaces, Mike remains quiet, and his face is impossible to read.

"What does it mean that you're here?" asks Walt, after their silence has amplified the sparks spitting from the fire, the snow falling endlessly outside.

"I would have thought that was obvious."

"What I meant was the first..." He stops before he can say _ghost_. "The first person who appeared to me here was Gale Boetticher. The second was Jesse. A few weeks ago, Gus. Now you. If there's a pattern here, something I should be seeing... it has to mean something, Mike." Walt is surprised at his own honesty, like blood welling up from a sudden wound, but he presses on. It has to mean something, other than fraying synapses, neurological decay.

"Why am I seeing these particular people, in this order?"

Instead of answering, Mike heaves himself up and goes to the door. The soft tapping sound they both heard could have been the mere settling of snow among nearby trees, but Mike peers through the window as if another visitor is waiting outside, and after a moment he raises an eyebrow and grunts in that way that passes for a laugh.

"You tell me."

"Will you be coming back?" Walt asks, without meaning to. Mike sighs, as if he's already made up his mind and has merely paused to contemplate a moment before speaking, and Walt perceives the steady grace of someone who knows there's a long journey ahead of him and is nonetheless secure in where he's going.

"I don't suppose I will," he says. "Goodbye, Walter."

Mike crosses the threshold, passes under the porch light, and is gone.

 

 

*

 

"Jesus," says Lydia, by way of a greeting. "You'll freeze to death." She closes the door, glances up and down the room, and shakes herself irritably. Her fine wool suit is speckled with melting snow, and her heels make a shattering sound against the wooden floor. Walt rubs his hands over his face. Lydia was tiring at the best of times.

"You could put some more wood on the fire," he suggests, waving towards the stove without looking at her. It occurs to him, perhaps absurdly, that she shouldn't be able to feel the cold. She shouldn't be shivering as she gingerly handles the firewood, and he shouldn't be able to see the slight movement of her shoulders as she breathes, not when Mike was so still.

"You're still alive," Walt says, and in a way feels relieved, because hallucinations - unlike ghosts - can be managed and understood. He can apply reliable, rational principles to the appearance of Lydia kneeling in front of the stove to warm her hands, although the implications are disturbing, and the question he asked Mike has been further complicated. Lydia cannot be another manifestation of his guilt.

"I can't figure out where you fit in," he admits. "The others are all dead."

Lydia nods, as if his thought process needs no further explanation. She has become vivid in the firelight, and she watches the smoke rise as if seeking patterns, calculating.

"I'm good at making connections," Lydia offers. "Perhaps that's where you need some help."

 _Not from you_ , Walt thinks, earning himself an affronted glance. Not from a hallucinatory version of the woman who once convinced him to rob a freight train. Lydia entered his life just as everything peaked and started to rush towards its horrific climax, and it cannot mean anything good that she is here now, next to him, kneeling on the bed to study the newspaper cuttings pinned to the wall.

 

 

 

True to his word, Mike never comes back, but on nights when the small hours stretch out endlessly past midnight and Walt is never sure whether he's asleep or awake, Lydia flits in and out like a misplaced migratory bird, never quite still. Sometimes, at Walt's request, she reads aloud from the patchwork of articles on the wall, constructing a story that seems as feverish and improbable as her presence itself: _Former Teacher Linked to Pollos Drug Ring_ ; _Schrader "Withdrawn, Preoccupied" Before Disappearance_ ; _Blue Meth Seized in Austria_. When Walt sits alone in the clarity of mid-morning and studies the same cuttings as closely as his eyesight allows, he finds she has exaggerated nothing.

Jesse appears even more frequently, and where Lydia is almost unnervingly lucid, he is slippery and unpredictable. He starts and ends their conversations in mid-sentence, loses himself in memories, and occasionally says nothing at all. He may be so calm he seems empty, or he may be screaming. Often, he is bruised and grazed and smells of scorched grass and gasoline. One night Walt wakes to find the cabin in flames; as he stumbles to the door, the fire dies away, and everything is left untouched.

 

 

{ _three_ }

Late in the winter, Skyler comes to him at last. She is cruelly indistinct but unmistakable, and so bright she seems to surround him. He breathes her in, and bends under the weight of their shared past. Coffee (they are twenty-one and thirty-two respectively and the tip of his pencil hovers above the page as he works up the nerve to ask her _excuse me, what do you have for eight across?_ ), cigarette smoke (it lingers in her car and in her hair _and I feel just terrible about it_ ), chlorine (they are forty and fifty-one respectively and she hates him so much she's shrinking into herself).

 _I'm sorry_ , he sobs. _I'm sorry_.

 _I understand_ , she doesn't say, although he's waiting for it, mouthing the words, prompting her, pleading. This Skyler hasn't come to forgive him. This Skyler has his blood on her sleeves and radiates a serene, unspeakable anguish.

For three days, the wind outside blows dry and hot, and the tamarack wood burns with the scent of piñon.

 

 

After Ed leaves, Walt sleeps through the rest of the infusion. He wakes with his hands too shaky to detach the intravenous line, though he grits his teeth and tries several times. It's maddening to struggle with something so small, but the pain pins him down.

"I got it, Mr. White. Just keep your arm still."

Gentle and methodical, Todd frowns in concentration, as he would over the fragile tools and vessels in the lab. Walt leans back and closes his eyes. Todd's hand brushes against his skin and there is the sudden absence of pain.

It's not so bad.

 

*

 

There are no flames this time, but a gun and a glass pipe lie in pieces on the floor, and Jesse has to be shaken awake in Walt's bed, in Walt's arms. His presence is sudden, startling, but not unwelcome. He's warm. A fluttering pulse is visible at the base of his throat.

"Mr. White," he sobs, his young face broken open, "I killed them. I killed them. I'm so sorry."

"You didn't kill anybody," Walt murmurs, half-asleep. It's not true, but it feels necessary. "You're not a killer, Jesse."

 _Some place nice and safe_ , he promised, long ago, and as Jesse shudders and stills, Walt thinks perhaps they've found that place at last. Here, the words fall comforting and soft around them and quiet Jesse's crying, and the more Walt says it the truer it becomes. Jesse was never a killer, really. Jesse was a good boy, a good son. Jesse only ever did what he felt he had to do to make things right.

"Everything's going to be just fine," Walt tells him, reaching out to draw him closer, to soothe him with hands on his shoulders. They settle seamlessly into each other. "I promise you. Everything's going to be just fine." All those nightmares happened somewhere else.

When Jesse stirs in his sleep, Walt's outstretched arm shifts across his shoulders. He doesn't feel his wedding ring slip free from his hand and fall away.

**Author's Note:**

> Titled after the Coldplay song, which was part of my playlist for this fic. The exchange between Walt and Gus is another quotation from "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau; I imagined Walt dwelling on his encounter with Gale despite his best efforts to put it out of his mind.


End file.
